Yahoo is planning to close the web’s leading social bookmarking site as part of a company-wide cost cutting programme.
The decision was revealed when an internal presentation slide, never meant to be public, was leaked to Twitter. The slide lists nine service that Yahoo plans to ‘sunset’.
In a statement, Yahoo didn’t deny the slide’s veracity, but declined to elaborate.
‘We continue to operate Delicious today, and will communicate specific details when appropriate,’ the statement says.
‘Part of our organisational streamlining involves cutting our investment in under-performing or off-strategy products to put better focus on our core strengths and fund new innovation in the next year and beyond. We continuously evaluate and prioritise our portfolio of products and services, and do plan to shut down some products in the coming months such as Yahoo! Buzz, our Traffic APIs, and others.’
While the loss of names such as AllTheWeb and Alta Vista is unlikely to be widely mourned, the demise of Delicious has been met with dismay.
‘Delicious has been shut down? Internet, what the hell,’ wrote TUAW’s Josh Helfferich in a not-untypical tweet.
The service has more than five million users who stored, tagged and shared more than 180 million URLs. Many users rely exclusively on Delicious for storing bookmarks which they can then access from any computer. However all is not lost; many rival services offer tools to import Delicious bookmarks, including Evernote, which provides the security of syncing with your Mac (or PC).
Yahoo purchased the site — then known as del.icio.us — in 2005 for an undisclosed price estimated at between $15 million and $30 million.
Prior to the Delicious leak, Yahoo announced 600 redundancies, 5% of its global workforce.
Earlier this week the founder of the Free Software Foundation urged computer users not to be taken in by the promise of cloud computing. Talking about Google’s new Chrome OS, Richard Stallman said cloud computing would be better described as ‘careless computing’.
‘I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there’s a sucker born every minute,’ Stallman told The Guardian. ‘The US government may try to encourage people to place their data where the US government can seize it without showing them a search warrant, rather than in their own property. However, as long as enough of us continue keeping our data under our own control, we can still do so. And we had better do so, or the option may disappear.’
